I have just received your letter of November 17, and
read your remarks with great interest. Of course we shall
try without fail to send you as many articles as possible,
as this is valuable for the publications in all respects, quite
apart from your natural interest in them. One thing we
are sorry about is that our secretary is
überarbeitet[1]
;
but
this will change soon all the same, because serious reforms
are afoot in the matter of
Kinderpflege.[2][3]

Danevich has sent in an item of about 12,000 letters
for the paper, on the French national congress; I hesitate
to say whether it is entirely suitable. Very possibly we
shall manage without it if we have your chronicle of events,
which we are awaiting impatiently. Danevich is writing
a big article on French affairs for the
journal.[4]

The enclosed letter is for Rolau: my colleague is writing
to him about our “tea” business, because we think that
my correspondent Skubiks is not in
town.[5] Please be good
enough to pass this letter on to Rolau, and ask him to reply
to us at once (forgive me for troubling you with such a
request: I hope you can entrust, say, Gurevich with this).
But if Rolau is not in town, would you be so kind as to
read the letter addressed to him, and have a talk about
its matter, if only with Skubiks’s wife. The thing is that
we must have a definite reply as soon as possible, and if
neither Rolau nor Skubiks is available, this can’t be done
otherwise than by a personal talk between you and someone
of their company.

As regards the article by
L. Axelrod,[6] I quite agree
with you that it should first of all be sent to G. V.

Notes

[3]A reference to the fact that I. G. Smidovich-Lehmann was
expecting a child.

[4]There was no article in Iskra No. 1 on French affairs by Danevich
(E. L. Gurevich). His first article, “Letters from France. Letter
One”, appeared in Iskra No. 6 in July 1901. No articles by
Danevich on the subject were carried by Zarya.

[5]A reference to the transportation of Iskra literature to Russia
via the Baltic provinces, which was undertaken by Latvian
students, Ernests Rolau and Eduards Skubiks, who were then resident
in Zurich. It later turned out that the police had been aware of
the existence of this transportation group; both consignments
of Iskra publications organised by Rolau and Skubiks in December
1900 and June 1901 had been confiscated. Transportation was
finally organised in mid-1901.

[6]A reference to the article by Lubov Axelrod (Orthodox), “Why
We Don’t Want to Go Back?” (on the book written by the liberal,
subsequently a reactionary, N. A. Berdayev, Subjectivism and
Individualism in Social Philosophy) carried in Zarya’s double
issue No. 2–3 in December 1901.